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There has been a revival of taste in common things, and
we care much more than our grandparents did about surrounding
ourselves with beauty. The struggle of life was harder for them,
and they had not time, as we have, for adorning tables and chairs,
arranging corners so that they are artistic and not hideous,
and making windows and walls rich with color and fair with softly
falling drapery.

HENRY DAVENPORT NORTHROP, The College of Life or Practical
Self-Educator: A Manual of Self-Improvement for the ColoredRace
(1895)

Northrop's The College of
Life emerged in 1895 as one representative of the many conduct
books published around the turn of the century. In the midst
of ideals of racial uplift, conduct books found a vast market
among a class of black Americans hoping to effect the advancement
of the race by adopting white middle class values and virtues.
In the book's preface, "To the Reader," the author
admitted that "some subjects concerning the race, but not
concerning Afro-American Progress, have been purposely omitted,
as it is believed these subjects are not in accord with the purpose
of the book" (iv). Instead, the book was intended as a "Self-Educator,"
a complete guide "to advise, encourage and educate the thousands
of young people of the race and to inspire them with a desire
to better their condition in life by Self-Improvement" (iv).
Those "purposely omitted" subjects--the lynchings and
Jim Crow laws of the American South, continuing racism of whites,
both Northern and Southern, discrimination in the workplace and
lack of jobs, and attacks against the virtue of black women--were
better left unsaid in a guide book concerned with "Afro-American
Progress." Likewise, the recent and still looming specter
of slavery is carefully euphemized in the epigraph that begins
this paper: for "our grandparents," the "struggle
of life was harder" (195). But the concern with beauty in
the home that the quote celebrates is much more than "a
revival of taste in common things." The home decoration
and claiming of domestic space that is so important for the middle-class
Victorian white woman, attains a far more crucial significance
for the middle-class black woman. Decorating tables and hanging
drapery becomes an expression of freedom. Only a generation or
two removed from slavery, with its shadow still a powerful collective
memory, the black woman's control over the domestic sphere represents
a power previously only granted to white women or freed blacks.
Marilyn R. Chandler in Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American
Fiction argues that

just as the history of the United States is a story of settling,
building homes, domesticating land, and defining space, our fiction
is, among other things, a history of the project of American
self-definition wherein house-building, and for women, housekeeping,
have been recognized as a kind of autobiographical enterprise--a
visible and concrete means of defining and articulating the self.
(3)

Further, Lois Lamphere Brown writes of the sentimental novel
that it "espouses an empowered domestic and matrifocal arena
that results in movement toward interiority for the heroine"
(56). Thus, although housekeeping could be confining as well
as liberating, in marked contrast to the position of African
American women during slavery, housekeeping allowed black women
increased opportunities for self-definition, for claiming not
only space but self-hood. Black women authors especially could
use domestic setting as a vehicle for addressing issues of self-articulation,
claiming a distinctly female space, and emphasizing the power
for political change that they saw inherent in that space. By
tracing discourses of domestic space, female virtue, and housekeeping
through several turn-of-the-century texts and connecting those
threads to those woven into Pauline Hopkins' Contending Forces,
there emerges a multi-layered tapestry centering around tropes
of domestic space and housekeeping as seats of distinctly female
power and influence, tropes used in interesting and sometimes
subversive ways by Hopkins.

Claudia Tate argues convincingly
that "the contrived setting and plot lines of the sentimental
courtship story in black women's post-Reconstruction domestic
novels encode allegorical political desire in the form of fulfilled
(rather than frustrated) liberational aspiration in the tropology
of domesticity" (Domestic Allegories 68). Thus,
while the sentimental plot ending in the marriage of the heroine
and her subversion to her husband may seem conservative, that
same plot can simultaneously occur with a plot in which political
desire is expressed and the heroine manifests subversive and
supposedly masculine qualities like independence, intelligence,
analytical thinking, or political awareness. In fact, these moments
of subversion in literature can be especially potent within the
traditional frame that they are subverting because their proximity
creates an powerful tension. Tate argues that one traditional
discourse that black women novelists of the turn-of-the-century
challenge is the prevalent belief that black women are lacking
virtue, are somehow controlled solely by their passions. Thus,
by presenting "a heroine who is an exemplar of feminine
purity, piety, and the work ethic" as well as outlining
"a plot that confirms bourgeois, social objectives of domesticity
and respectability," black women writers of domestic novels
challenge negative images of black women's virtue and posit an
alternative that espouses the virtue and purity previously associated
only with white women (8). For turn-of-the-century blacks set
on racial uplift, female purity becomes a significant trope for
discussing racial equality.

The abundance of conduct books
connecting virtue and purity to racial uplift are manifestations
of this discourse. The College of Life is divided into
two sections; the first half celebrates the achievements of colored
men and women, and the second offers advice on "the Proper
Conduct of Life." Hopkins herself, in an article about women's
clubs for The Colored American Magazine, stresses that
the object of one of the colored women's clubs is "the furtherance
of the interests of the race generally and of our women particularly,"
through "the collecting of facts which shall show our true
position to the world" (273). Proving black women's virtue
to the white world, a world seemingly obsessed with their own
cult of true womanhood, is a necessary precondition for racial
uplift. In 1905, Edna Wheeler Wilcox writes of a "very beautiful
octoroon" with "higher ideals of womanhood, wifehood,
and motherhood than many fashionable white women" (388).
Armed with this example, she concludes that it is "little
less than an evidence of senility, or of idiocy, for any white
person to declare the education and elevation of the race to
be a failure" (388). The domestic novels of the time presented
the same argument; as Tate writes, "the story of ideal family
formulation was especially well suited to this first [black]
audience because its formulaic plot line encoded bourgeois constructions
of the successful individual, community, and society to which
that audience subscribed" (7). All of these texts have,
as one of their purposes, the revelation to whites of
black progress.

This discourses on female virtue
are interdependent with turn-of-the-century discourses on housekeeping
and domestic space. Marilyn Ferris Motz writes that "the
atmosphere of the home was seen as having an almost mystical
effect on its inhabitants, determining their moral standards,
happiness, and success in the outside world" (1). Victorian
women, both black and white, were designated guardians of a specifically
domestic sphere in an era when the worlds of men and women were
increasingly differentiated along the lines of gender. Despite
the confining aspects of this intimate connection, I agree with
those who argue that a certain power resided in the role; in
some ways, the increasing differentiation allowed for less emphasis
on "superior" and "inferior" roles. Instead,
woman's sphere possessed its own importance and inherent power
and offered women a crack in a once tightly sealed door, a way
to effect change: "to keep house . . . was also to keep
bodies, spirits, souls. To keep house was not only to cook, clean,
and nurse, but also to regulate and police . . . Housekeeping
meant not only keeping but also being kept, trapped, confined,
sweated. Yet housekeeping could also mean empowerment and freedom"
(Dickerson xxi). Thad Logan writes that "the middle-class
woman was taught to consider the tasteful decoration of her home
as an important part of her duty, a duty whose broader outlines
included both the physical and spiritual well-being of her family.
Decoration, in this context, became linked to morality"
(209). Turn-of-the-century blacks also emphasized this connection;
at a woman's club convention that Pauline Hopkins reports on
in The Colored American Magazine, the women begin their
meeting with a prayer:

Lord, from the four corners of the world we have come to this
convention, as representing the homes of the world. It is to
these homes the effects of this meeting, for good or for evil,
will go. May many homes be made stronger and sweeter, may many
crooked ways be made straight by what we shall do and say here.
(274)

These women believe in their power to play out the world's
battle between good and evil with the home as a base for change.
Woman's sphere was an extension of the world as a whole; whether
actual or not, the ideal conception of this sphere placed the
power to shape morality, and from there to shape the outside
world, in women's hands.

Yet, most of the sources I have
used about the connections between housekeeping and morality
concern white middle class women. Next to nothing has been written
about the relationship between black women, housekeeping,
and domestic space. However, as I have already posited, black
women possessed an especially powerful respect for the implications
of even having one's own house to "keep." Discourse
analysis of the writing of some of Hopkins' contemporaries reveals
a deep connection between virtue and home, progress and housekeeping,
racial "advancement" and domestic space, a connection
especially relevant to black women. Booker T. Washington, in
1902 in a magazine article entitled "Negro Homes,"
writes as his very first sentence: "I do not believe it
is possible for any one to judge very thoroughly of the life
of any individual or race unless he gets into the homes"
(378). He specifically praises one house because he "saw
little about the house except the color of the occupants to remind
me that I was in the house of a Negro" (378-379). While
he posits that by emulating the homes of whites, Negroes will
be able to present their true, virtuous colors, Washington also
implies that the conduct represented by white homes should be
imitated as well. In other words, it is not merely qualities
such as cleanliness and neatness that should be emulated, but
the implications of those qualities: morality, virtue, cleanliness
of "soul." Another article in The Colored American
Magazine, a few years later in 1905, seconds Washington's
opinion; Edna Wheeler Wilcox writes in "On the Making of
Homes" that "at the present era I would say that a
higher ideal of the home, and of what was demanded of those who
have received a certain amount of education in their attitude
toward that home, was the important one for the colored race
to attain" (387). In the pursuit of racial uplift, Wilcox
places a "higher ideal of the home" as the most important
concern for the colored race because "the home, not the
adornment of the person, marks the progress of any race from
the crude to the civilized state" (387). Once again, morality
and civilization (read "white civilization") are linked
to the appearance of the home.

Home and virtue are also connected
to women's education and authority by several other turn-of-the-century
black writers, including Hopkins herself. In her "Famous
Women of the Negro Race" series, Hopkins writes of educated
black women that "education has not caused these women to
shirk the cares and responsibilities of private life; rather,
we believe, each feels the blessing which her example must be
to the entire race. Education, with us, does not encourage celibacy
but is developing pleasant homes and beautiful families"
(450). Further, Hopkins asserts that "no true man can object
to thus developing the higher nature of women [through education],"
because such development helps "make home most like heaven
in its serenity" (450). Hopkins inextricably links the education
and advancement of women to a better home life, which, as we
have already seen, is itself closely connected in contemporary
discourses to the advancement of the moral quality of the entire
race, both men, women, and children. Margaret Murray Washington
further makes this link in 1905 in an article entitled "The
Advancement of Colored Women." For her, this advancement
centers around two things: education and "purified homes"
(186). Like Hopkins, she feels the necessity of defending against
those who attack women's education as damaging to domestic life;
of educated women she writes, "If one should take the time
to go into the homes of these women, whether single or married,
he would find a broadening of the family circle, tasty furnishings,
order, cleanliness, softer and nicer manners of the younger children,
a more tender regard for parents, a stricter idea of social duties
and obligations in the home" (185). Echoing Booker T. Washington,
she contends that the best way to judge a race is through their
behavior at home (185). Further, she also connects virtue to
the home. A missionary who changes the lives of plantation blacks
begins by cleaning and decorating a cabin, later giving the black
women "the gospel of cleanliness, of true motherhood, of
purified homes" (186). These phrases, a discourse of domestic
space, are used by Washington, Wilcox, and Hopkins as well, further
strengthening the link between the ordering and use of domestic
space, virtue, and racial advancement. But the education of women
is added to the equation. Increasing the knowledge of women and
widening their sphere becomes a possibility within the traditional
system, whereas they were once seen as detrimental to that system.

Claudia Tate writes that in
Hopkins' work, "we find that she habitually insisted that
black men and women be responsible for the course of their own
advancement and that duty, virtue, carefully controlled emotions,
and the institution of marriage are the key components for directing
social progress" ("Pauline Hopkins" 65). I would
add that images of home and housekeeping are one of the codes
for this direction of social progress. Thus, while Tate, Hazel
Carby, and others have pointed out the ways in which Hopkins
revises racialized conceptions of virtue, she also complicates
the notion of home, creating the domestic sphere as a site of
tension where conceptions of virtue, female authority, and power
coincide. Literature was seen as having a special power to do
this; Victoria Earle Matthews in her address "The Value
of Race Literature" writes that race literature's role is
to counter negative portrayals of blacks in white literature;
women's role is especially vital: "woman's part in Race
Literature, as in Race building, is the most important part and
has been so in all ages. It is for her to receive impressions
and transmit them" (184). From the very beginning of Contending
Forces, Hopkins assumes this role, creating in the novel
a matrix of the forces of home space, virtue, and the power of
race literature.

In the story of the white ancestors
of Hopkins' hero Will and one of her heroines, Dora, domestic
space immediately assumes a vital presence. Having left the Edenic
paradise of Bermuda, Charles and Grace Montfort attempt to establish
their own Eden on their plantation in America. In a passage reminiscent
of the description of domestic space in the conduct book The
College of Life, Hopkins describes how "within the
house Mr. Montfort had gathered all the treasures which could
possibly add to the comfort and pleasure of his lively wife.
Beautiful rugs covered the floors, fine paintings adorned the
walls, gleaming statuary flashed upon one from odd nooks and
corners" (43). A bit later we learn that when she sees guests
approaching, Grace Montfort, "with usual Southern hospitality,
looked over her well-appointed board to make sure that all was
in order for dispensing those creature comforts so dear to the
entertainer and entertained" (66). Grace Montfort's beautifully
appointed home and her hostess skills are codes for her virtue.
Even more beautiful than her beautiful home, the implication
is that Grace's home is a manifestation of her virtue and purity.
Her virtuous body is further connected to her "virtuous"
home when the approaching guests turn out to be attackers who
will kill her husband, take her children as slaves, and violate
Grace. One of the attackers (whom her husband has whipped for
"insolence") vows that Grace's "lily-like limbs,
the tender flesh that had never known aught but the touch of
love, should feel the lash as he had" (68). A few
pages later, the attackers turn their anger to the house; they
"took possession of the mansion. Soon the crowd had stripped
it of its furniture and all the articles of value. The house
itself was fired, and Grace Montfort again became conscious of
her misery in time to see the dead body of her husband flung
amid the burning rafters of his dwelling" (70). Grace is
"driven away from her outraged home" (70). Words like
"possession," "stripped," and "outraged"
applied to the house mimic the language used during Grace's symbolic
rape at the whipping post. The violation of the house mirrors
the violation of the female body. The burning is merely a symbolic
gesture of completion for the house is already "stripped"
of its "value," just as Grace's suicide offers "sweet
oblivion" (71) because she has lost her "value"
by contemporary standards of female purity.

Later in the novel, our separate
introductions to the two heroines, Dora and Sappho, take place
within domestic space, a domestic space that signifies purity
in ways that evoke both Grace's connection to her house and accounts
contemporary to Hopkins. Dora Smith helps take charge of her
mother's boarding house after the death of her father, "proving
herself to be a woman of ability and the best of managers"
(85). Her domestic skills reveal her virtue and good character.
In fact, later in the novel, the family's long-lost white relative
Montfort-Withington "never once thought of the possible
ridicule that might come to him through his new [black] kinspeople"
(377). Part of this "nobility" is related to the fact
that he admires the Smith's well-decorated home, its parlor with
its "general good taste, even elegance" (371). In fact,
the decor of the Smith home causes him to wonder about Ma Smith,
"by what art of necromancy had such a distinguished woman
been evolved from among the brutalized aftermath of slavery?"
(371). His thoughts evoke the previously quoted article by Booker
T. Washington in which Washington admires a Negro home because
he sees little to remind him that he "was in the house of
a Negro" (379). Hopkins, through Dora and the Smiths, challenges
Washington's assumptions and creates black domestic space with
as much elegance as a white home.

As for Sappho, we hear from
Dora of her beauty and how she fills "a long-felt want"
in Dora's life (98), but her first actual appearance takes place
in her room. Dora is "struck" by the changes Sappho
has made to her room and with the "very inviting interior"
she has created (98). In fact, although Dora has been affected
by Sappho from the first moment she met her, it is only after
Dora compliments the room that Sappho becomes equally affected:
"'How pretty you have made it,' observed Dora, looking curiously
around the room. Sappho came and stood beside her, and the two
girls smiled at each other in a glow of mutual interest, and
became fast friends at once" (98). Their shared pleasure
in the domestic implies a shared virtue. However, "virtue"
in the case of Sappho is complicated by Hopkins. We later learn
that Sappho has been raped and has a child. Yet, unlike Grace
Montfort, Sappho's story does not end with death. Claudia Tate
writes, "the antebellum discourse binds Grace to the conventional
fate of the sexually violated heroine--death. By contrast, the
postbellum discourse . . . presents a heroine whose virtue is
not simply the product of sexual innocence; she qualifies herself
as a virtuous person through the strength of her character"
(161). In fact, I would argue that Hopkins' detailed attention
to Sappho's decorating skills operates as one code for her still
intact virtue, despite her rape. With these details, Hopkins
challenges contemporary discourses which posit home as a concept
completely opposed to virtue. For example, Victoria Earle Matthew
says in an 1897 speech that

from such small beginnings [i.e. slavery], [the Afro- American
woman] was compelled to construct a home. She who had been an
outcast, the caprice of brutal power and passion, who had been
educated to believe that morality was an echo, and womanly modesty
a name; she who had seen father and brother and child torn from
her and hurried away into everlasting separation---this creature
was born to life in an hour and expected to create a home. (151)

Matthews' rhetorical strategy repeatedly places "home"
in opposition to such qualities as passion and lack of morality
and womanly modesty. Her speech evokes the scene in Contending
Forces where Montfort-Withington, the Smiths' white relative
(whom Hopkins treats with some irony), wonders how Ma Smith could
create such an elegant home having "been evolved from among
the brutalized aftermath of slavery" (371). Hopkins challenges
both Matthews' and the character Montfort-Withington's assumptions
by not only allowing Sappho to be a survivor of rape but also
allowing her to feel passion for Will, further problematizing
the white conception of virtue. Hopkins "expands the notion
of true womanhood to include both the 'fallen woman' (the true
woman's polar opposite in terms of class and sexual purity) and
the African American woman (the model's opposite in racial terms)"
(McCullough 42). The shadow of slavery that hovered over turn-of-the-century
black women, in the hands of Hopkins, becomes no longer incompatible
with virtue, domestic beauty, and concepts of home.

Domestic space, in both the
physical and metaphorical sense of "home," continues
to play a key role in the development of Sappho and Dora's relationship.
Carla Peterson calls Sappho's room an "exclusive and inviolate
female space" (188). In the chapter titled "Friendship,"
we are told that "by eleven o'clock [the two women] had
locked the door of Sappho's room to keep out all intruders, had
mended the fire until the little stove gave out a delicious warmth,
and had drawn the window curtains close to keep out stray currents
of air" (117). This passage evokes contemporary descriptions
of ideal domestic space. The difference lies in the fact that
two women occupy the space; there is no "master" of
this cozy home. The room even becomes the site of homoerotic
tension between the two women. After a "scramble" for
pie, "mingled with peals of merry laughter," Sappho
emerges "from the fray," "all rosy and sparkling"
(120). Dora , discussing her lack of love and passion for her
current suitor, tells Sappho, "'I do despair of ever being
like other girls . . . That's just what makes me feel so unsexed,
so to speak'" (122). Their relationship is a powerful one;
even when Dora later marries, she names her daughter Sappho.
Laura Doyle writes that Sappho the younger "serves as a
continuing sign of the homoeroticism between Dora and the elder
Sappho. Although the girl is the bodily offspring of Arthur and
Dora, she is the symbolic offspring of the relation between Sappho
and Dora, as her name indicates" (180).

Sappho's room is such an "exclusive
and inviolate female space" that when Will later intrudes
upon the space he is feminized by being portrayed as wearing
one of his mother's aprons and as tending Sappho's fire for her.
John Langley's invasion of this space without knocking is a violation
of all rules. When John reproaches Sappho for her supposed rudeness
to him (even though he is the one who has entered without knocking),
Sappho replies, "'This is hardly the time or place for parlor
civilities'" (317). Sappho then tells him that his "intrusion
into [her] private apartment is unpardonable" (318). By
entering female space (without being at least symbolically feminized
or de-gendered like Will), John commits an act that moves beyond
"civilities" into the realm of the unpardonable. His
proposal that she become his mistress completes the profanation.
Only when it remains a female domain is Sappho's room entirely
safe. The implication is that, with the door locked behind them,
the two women are allowed to use this distinctly feminine space
as a center for expression of their true feelings and impulses.
They can discuss men and love and marriage. But the space is
also one in which they are free to express more intellectual
ideas. They go on to discuss the "evils under which the
colored man labors" (125), and Sappho feels free to call
Arthur Lewis an "insufferable prig" because of his
sexist attitude toward women (126). Further, by the portrayal
of this domestic space, site of virtue, Hopkins expands the conception
of "true womanhood" to include homoerotic feelings,
political beliefs, and forthright opinion sharing. It is "safe"
for her to portray these traditionally non-feminine expressions
because she has created a framework of virtue (as associated
with the domestic) in which to present them.

The chapter entitled "The
Sewing-Circle" also centers around the expression of political
desires and opinions within a domestic setting. In a chapter
called "Home Occupations for Leisure Hours" in Northrop's
The College of Life, we read that "the delight
of knitting is its sociability . . . the lady who knits may talk
at the same time and be witty or wise as she pleases" (197).
But the conversation in Hopkins sewing-circle scene moves far
beyond sociability and casual chatting as a manner in which to
occupy leisure hours. Carla Peterson writes of the sewing-circle
that it is "positioned midway between domestic and public
spheres" (187). I think Hopkins is using "The Sewing-Circle"
in ways similar to how Hopkins' and Margaret Murray Washington's
magazine articles advocate education for women, promoting it
as a tool for a better, purer, happier domestic realm. Several
scholars, including Claudia Tate, point out that Sappho's political
expression remains confined to the domestic sphere and no women
speak out in the "American Colored League" sections
of the book where several men speak eloquently. However, in some
ways Hopkins is still being subversive rather than traditional.
By allowing Mrs. Willis to speak of "the place which the
virtuous woman occupies in upbuilding a race" within a typical
domestic setting--a group of women sewing--Hopkins points to
the power inherent in women's sphere, in the domestic, and challenges
magazine and conduct book notions of the proper "occupations"
of women's "leisure hours." Hopkins further supports
this idea with the following paragraph in the midst of her description
of Mrs. Willis:

Trivialities are not to be despised. Inborn love implanted
in a woman's heart for a luxurious, esthetic home life, running
on well-oiled wheels amid flowers, sunshine, books and priceless
pamphlets, easy chairs and French gowns, may be the means of
developing a Paderewski or freeing a race from servitude. (147)

This passage, reminiscent of contemporary descriptions of
ideal domestic space, is immediately connected to the Mrs. Willis'
political skills, the "way she governed societies and held
her position," her power on committees and votes (147).
A "well-oiled" home life can be the means of political
change, even of "freeing a race from servitude." Hopkins
takes assertions like Victoria Earle Matthew's, that "home
is the noblest, the most sacred spot in a Christian nation"
(151), one step farther; home also becomes an appropriate center
for political change.

Sappho, despite her divergence
from standard notions of purity, is the character most capable
of creating this well-oiled, noble home. Initially, when John
Langley first reveals her secret, Sappho flees from Will Smith,
afraid that he will not accept her now that he knows her virtue
is "false." The first step in the couple's mutual suffering,
the suffering that will eventually make their marriage more meaningful,
is this separation. After assuming the duties of motherhood,
Sappho ends up as a governess in the home of Monsieur Louis.
Once again, descriptions of a beautiful home are keys to the
domestic security and purity of the described abode; Monsieur
Louis' home is "well furnished, comfortable, and every want
abundantly supplied" (353). Sappho soon becomes "the
moving spirit of the home," reinforcing the domestic's connection
to true virtue, and Sappho's connection to that virtue despite
her sexual history. But Monsieur Louis' marriage proposal is
not enough for Sappho, or for Hopkins. Instead, she is passionately
reunited with Will, a man who shares her political ideals and
concern with the advancement of the race. Hopkins seems to posit
that the ideal home is one which possesses all the physical beauties,
but that also can encompass passion and an educated woman with
political desires and opinions, while remaining "virtuous."
In her world, these qualities are no longer incompatible. As
Hopkins writes in a magazine article:

The highest degree of moral culture is necessary between a
wedded pair for the care of those Christian virtues which make
home most like heaven in its serenity, unselfishness and attractiveness.
No true man can object to thus developing the higher nature of
women; we all have the happiness of knowing a far greater number
of examples of women, intelligent and cultivated, active in good
work, interested in all that is worthy of interest, who by the
development of their faculties have added grace and luster to
their natural attractions. (450)

Will Smith comes from that species of "true man,"
one who desires an "intelligent and cultivated" woman.
In sharp contrast to John Langley's violation of female space,
Will, to a certain extent, is willing to play with gender roles,
wearing the apron, so to speak. Thus, in the last pages of the
book, Hopkins adds the final, necessary ingredient to the mixture
of the domestic ideal: a love between partners. Throughout Contending
Forces, Hopkins uses domestic space as a code for virtue,
creating in Sappho Clark a heroine whose virtue challenges traditional
notions of female purity. Domestic space opens out upon the world;
as Nina Baym writes, "the domestic ideal meant not that
woman was to be sequestered from the world in her place at home
but that everybody was to be placed in the home, and hence home
and the world would become one" (27). Domestic space becomes
the seat of female power and influence, and the connection between
domesticity and virtue is expanded to encompass a broadening
sphere for women, one which includes passion and sexuality, education
and intelligence, political and analytical thinking, and the
hope of effecting change.

Works Cited

Baym, Nina. Women's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and
about Women in America, 1820-1870. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1978.